BottleMark recently added some new fun stuff to the shop.
We've got blank caps for those of you without any custom cap ambitions. Fully lined white and silver caps for $0.03 each.
Our bounty is as boundless as the sea
We're also offering these totally bizarre bullseye caps. We printed a whole heap of these to help calibrate our printer. They're raw caps, so the design may scratch a bit. But they're perfectly good for capping!
Won't you give one a home? Only a penny each.
Our favorite new product: practically-perfect-in-every-way bottle cap magnets. At 3/4" they nest exquisitely inside of a bottle cap. Ideal for crafting or displaying your custom cap. Order a magnet for each of your designs!
Made for each other.
Crafting with bottle caps? Check out our new services...
If you don't own a capper ($15-$60 bucks) but still want the "finished look" of a bottle cap, let us cap your caps for you!
Uncapped vs. capped (definitely a crafting-only service).
Making bottle cap jewelry and need a hole for a jump ring? We're punching small holes in caps for our customers, too.
Bottle cap collecting is totally awesome. They're small, colorful, unique, and—like little love notes carefully stowed away in a shoebox—the sole bearers of deliciously delicate memories, of Blonde Ales and Belgians once tasted, now gone. Check out our collection of commercial caps:
My love life, mounted on a magnetic board.
And now with custom caps, these memories can be all the more delicious. You probably want to preserve one from your order for posterity.
So how do you open a beer bottle without damaging the cap? The average opener bends the cap in the middle: a very unattractive result. So everyone's on the search for "The Perfect Bottle Opener." What does BottleMark recommend?
The simple answer: if you're homebrewing, use twist-off bottles! No opener required, and you get a undamaged cap every time. Only problem: twist-off bottles are really weak. A twist-off bottle has a thinner lip than a normal bottle (and bottle cappers grab onto the lip of the bottle with lots of force), so after two or three uses, the top will break off. Yikes!
DO NOT WANT!
Some homebrewers don't bother using them.
So...is there a way to preserve caps on normal bottles? The best answer: The perfect bottle opener is the one that you have. Plus a quarter.
Here's the trick...
1. Place a coin on top of the cap (a US quarter is the ideal size). The coin transfers the pressure from the middle of the cap to the edged teeth of the cap, thus preserving the cap's shape.
2. Gently apply your bottle opener to two or three places on the cap. Gently, mind you! The cap should come off easily in your hand, without any violence, if you do it right. NOTE: If you apply your opener to one place only, you'll end up with a flared edge.
See the technique in action (both correctly and incorrectly performed) in this short video...
But if you've run out of change and the bottle's not a twist-off, try to find an opener without any sharp teeth to it (the wider, the better) and apply mild pressure all-round.
